The Corn Is Green

Only a few years ago, most city folk thought that good ole country music was something only a born hillbilly could love. Now flat-picked guitars and twangy banjos have begun to compete with even the loudest howls of amplified rock; soulful laments about careless love are heard as often as hip pop. Last year's cornball is this year's lollipop -and to underline changing tastes, a new monthly magazine, Country Music, is Johnny-Cashing in.

Dreamed up over a Yale Club luncheon 18 months ago by a pair of Yale engineering alumni and a retired shoe-company executive, Country Music has jumped to a circulation of 70,000 in the eight months of its existence. Ad pages have gone up from six in the first two issues to 17 in the most recent number; projections call for 25 pages by September. Co-Founder John Killion predicts the magazine will be in the black from now on. "We had no background in music," says Killion, "but we knew what we wanted: quality writing and photography." Killion and his partners -Russell Barnard, who is publisher of Harper's, and Spencer Oettinger, the former shoe manufacturer -needed first of all an editor and a backer. They recruited Peter McCabe, a writer for Rolling Stone, to run the magazine and coaxed Publisher John Cowles of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co. into putting his company behind the project.

The magazine's formula -still not firmly se -is a mix of interviews with prominent musicians and takeouts on their lifestyles. There are personality pieces on country stars like Tammy Wynette and Waylon Jennings, photo takeouts on the mammoth cross-country buses converted into rolling homes by many performers, reviews of films and books that might interest country-music enthusiasts, and of course notices of new country records.

One of the few mistakes Country Music has made about its audience so far has been to print 5,000 posters of Hee Haw Star (and Country Music humor columnist) Archie Campbell. He is sprawled in the pose made famous by Burt Reynolds in Cosmopolitan and clad in red-and-white-striped long underwear. Of the 5,000 posters printed, Country Music has sold just 37. "We discovered," says McCabe, "that our readers wallpaper their walls. Unlike rock fans, they don't put up posters."

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